SAP TechEd 2019 Takeaways Part 1

Hello Neomore Community

Our team visited SAP TechEd 2019 in Barcelona and we’d like to share some of our ideas and experiences with You. Critical and quite a challenging preparation for the event was planning of the personal agenda from numerous events in the Session Catalog. The handy SAP TechEd app helped a lot but drilling down to detailed content of the sessions took a lot of time. Finally, when the personal agenda was ready for all of us, we had to remember to reserve the place where pre-booking was mandatory.

We arrived in Barcelona the previous evening and spotted the airport TechEd registration. That saved us few minutes next morning as we didn’t need to stand in queues.

Key Notes

SAP CTO Jürgen Müller guided us on the journey to the intelligent enterprise via Operations, Intelligence and Experience concepts. Most of the content was already familiar from the earlier sessions with SAP but it was well presented summary with interesting guests and some fresh published insights. However, compared to e.g. User group meetings in different countries where the key notes are presented by SAP customers with actual experience, we found this a bit too like sales promotion.

After the keynote we divided to different sessions and hands-on exercises based on our interest. This time the key areas were Customer presentations, roadmap to S/4HANA, SAP analytics Cloud and not forgetting Robotics & AI and Fiori /UI development & ABAP in the new environment. And, of course, networking & meeting SAP experts, our partners and customers. Unfortunately, some of the topics we would have liked to hear and discuss were not on the agenda at all -or just a side mark in the other sessions.

Roadmap to S/4HANA

Though this is already an old topic and we already have tasted the transition to S/4HANA one of the most useful part of TechEd was to get the latest updates about the methods, tools and processes towards it. Old, even misleading, information from SAP has been clarified and SAP seems to provide useful tools to clarify the road to S/4HANA. Without drilling to details it seems both options to upgrade and to migrate the existing system to S/4HANA are finally quite well supported by SAP.

Mapping Your Journey to SAP S/4HANA – A Practical Guide for Senior IT Leadership

The Analytical viewpoint, SAP analytics cloud

Interesting topics on SAP analytics cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC). The role of the SAP analytics cloud is increasing as we speak. More to follow on the next blog post.

 Fiori, The modern user interface & ABAP Platform

One of the main themes in Teched was still Fiori and the modern UI. The steps we did some years ago seems to be successful as the general overview is still that we are well ahead in areas of usability and adopting the UI technology to business processes. The latest technical updates and hands-on workshops in Teched strengthen our skills and confirms our visons where to concentrate in the near future -without developing something which will come by SAP standard deliveries.

As before, the ABAP Platform slogan was loud and clear: “Take your ABAP skills to SAP HANA and the Cloud”.

More to follow on Fiori and ABAP in the coming blog posts!

Machine learning, AI, IoT, robotics etc

Again, there were sessions regarding machine learning, AI, IoT robotics but still we were expecting more on these subjects. Compared to other areas the presentations weren’t on the same level – or we missed the best part and our expectations were too high? Anyway, we got some new ideas and tips to be processed at home so let’s see…

Solution Manager, Focus build

As SAP offers solution manager and focused build as the foundation for running your S/4HANA project the sessions on this topic were few and surprisingly high level. Even the hands-on session was more of a copy paste show and not really giving any guidance as to how efficiently use the system for the project management, migration, testing etc.

Takeaways

As a conclusion we can say that SAP TechED is what it promises, a technical view towards SAP. The best takeaways we got from Analytics Cloud, ABAP and Fiori/UI. The conference delivers what it promises, a good insight to technical SAP consultants. For us that expected to get also insights on not so technical details were left with less to take home. The conference itself is something to see and if you are an SAP professional with a more project manager or functional role the conference is worth the experience, at least once.

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